Wednesday, June 29, 2011

A few years ago, I finished writing my second-ever novel, and the first-ever one I was proud of. It's a confusing book about characters doing seemingly-entertaining things in a seemingly-entertaining universe. Upon re-reading it recently, I realized several things, the first of which was that the story itself was quite bad. The second was that it badly needs to be re-tooled, re-written or scrapped completely.

Here's where things get fun for you, gentle reader; I'm going to be taking Steven King's advice from On Writing. I'm going to murder my darlings, (meaning my story), and I'm going to do it in public, neighbors be damned! This Friday I'll be posting the first bit, and hopefully I can stick with it this time. It'll be a learning experience for everyone!

To avoid accidentally getting the book stolen and published (as if) from this blog, I'm going to be editing select "problematic" segments, completely out of order. That way the thief will actually have to put some effort into their theft.

Friday, June 24, 2011

The ship was being pulled toward the black hole, completely unable to save itself. The crew, naturally, was in quite a panic. Captain Marcus, who was usually quite cool-headed, wasn't himself; of course, if your ship was about to plummet into a black hole and then be compressed into singularity, you'd be worried too. No one had ever gone through and lived, or so the science books claimed. Captain Marcus didn't have much use for that kind of knowledge, as he thought of it as defeatist rubbish.

Flint, the ship's sole remaining mechanic, was the least panicked of those on board. Although he knew all of the science behind black holes, and then some, he felt a sudden lightness. This was, in all likelihood, due to the drugs he had taken moments before, washed down with the strongest liquor aboard the ship, which Flint had brewed himself. It also might have been gasoline.

There was a sound like whales mating, which of course would have been much more frightening, as the ship entered the tear in space. The metal and rivets groaned their complaint, a loud, jarring, scraping roarthat became upsetting after only a moment.

"It just figures," Flint thought, his drug-addled mind momentarily pulling him back to the real world, "I just bought that new boat."

The rest of the crew were experiencing similar thoughts, although none of theirs involved boats, and only a few of them were affected by drugs and liquor. The groaning of the ship increased in volume, bringing with it bone-rattling vibration, which served to make what remained of the crew's lives somewhat more uncomfortable, except for Flint, who found it soothing to his head, which had begun to hurt.

It didn't take long for the ship to make it through. In fact, the crew was rather surprised to find that they were not only still alive, but the ship seemed to be in one piece. The view screens didn't seem to work, but there was a single window that Captain Marcus had had installed because he "didn't trust the technology very much."

Through the window, which everyone had promptly crowded around, they could see the space on the other side of space, which turned out to be white. As regular space is black as night, of course inverted space is white. It was much like being in a Microsoft Word document, or a blank sheet of canvas. The stars shone like black rubies in the white expanse of space.

"Of course," said Flint to the gathered crew, "there's probably air our here as well, since our space has none."

Strangely, the crew found that to be a rather logical conclusion, and before anyone could stop him, Ensign Privy had flung open the bay door and stepped out into space. He had failed to realize that, since our space has no gravity, negative space would, and he fell until he hit a planet, some three-hundred million miles away. The fall wouldn't kill him but the starvation would. The people on the planet were very much like the people on ours, except they didn't care about saving their planet, and they respected one another. So actually, it wasn't anything like our planet.